Union Hill tops list of city's distressed areas

Standing on the sidewalk before a vacant Dorchester Street house, its lower windows boarded up, Lorraine Laurie sees in her mind's eye through the sheets of plywood.

The 63-year-old lifelong Union Hill resident sees back in time — back before the mortgage defaults spread through the neighborhood like a fever, before the foreclosures, the boarded-up windows and the fires. She sees back to the 1950s, when she was a little girl peering curiously through the home's living room window at a baby grand piano played by an opera singer named Mary McMahan.

The old man who owned the house would shoo her away if she lingered too long.

But the piano and the protective homeowner are long gone.

“Now I watch to see if any of the boards are off or if the door is ajar. If it is, well, I call Inspectional Services,” said Ms. Laurie, who knows that missing boards often signify copper thieves, junkies or squatters.

San Francisco-based Wells Fargo Bank foreclosed on the forlorn white house last fall. Its front door is padlocked, and a notice posted this month by one of the international bank's property management vendors proclaims the house was winterized, made ready to sit empty indefinitely.

Another hole in a neighborhood where the foreclosure crisis persists more than six years after it began.

A dozen buildings around Union Hill, many of them multifamily properties, were owned by far-flung banks as of early April. Nineteen foreclosure petitions were working through the legal process, and five auctions had been scheduled, according to the Boston real estate data firm The Warren Group.

“Something has happened to this area. We need to do something,” said an exasperated Edward Hoxha, who settled on Dorchester Street a few years after immigrating to this country from Albania two decades ago.

He owns a three-decker at Dorchester Street and Rice Lane, where he lives on one floor with his wife and two teenagers. He has tenants on the other floors.

“Now I have to put a fence here, so I don't see the trash,” he said, pointing to his backyard. “It used to be nice here.”

The Union Hill area corresponds roughly to U.S. Census Tract No. 7324, which ranks as the most-distressed tract with at least a thousand homes and apartments in the city and the sixth-most-distressed in the state. It ranks just behind four blighted Brockton tracts and one in Springfield, according to an analysis by the Massachusetts Housing Partnership.

The quasi-public housing finance and advocacy agency defines distressed properties as those owned by banks or where a foreclosure petition has been filed or an auction scheduled. It counts units in three-deckers separately because more than one family is affected in a foreclosure.

“If they've been long-term tenants who really became part of the neighborhood, that you could meet them at the corner store or see them out sweeping, it's like you're losing part of the family,” Ms. Laurie said. “When they board up the house, it looks like a bad tooth, and neighbors have to keep a real good eye on it.”

Home to more than 6,500 people, the arrowhead-shaped Census tract with Union Hill at its center is one of the most densely populated neighborhoods in the city. It has seen several major building fires in the last few years, including the tragic blaze at 49 Arlington St. that cost Firefighter Jon D. Davies Sr. his life in December 2011.

Housing policy experts said the continuing problems on Union Hill also harm other neighborhoods where the worst of the foreclosure crisis has passed.

“It's one big housing market,” said Clark Ziegler, executive director of Massachusetts Housing Partnership. “Even if you're in the suburbs of Worcester, having urban values drop affects the whole region. It's not just an urban problem. It's a broader market problem.”

In interviews last week, residents across Union Hill fretted about the social damage to their community, expressed optimism that things may be about to turn around, and, in several cases, said they were afraid to publicly discuss the rash of crime and quality of life problems that came on the heels of the housing crisis for fear of courting trouble from neighborhood gangs.

Diane Nichols moved to Barclay Street a year ago from Ohio to take a job as director of diversity and student leadership at Worcester Academy.

She likes her spacious apartment on the second floor of a three-decker and sees advantages to the neighborhood compared to her previous home in the suburbs of Cleveland.

“I look at this as a working-class area. There's a unity here that's sometimes lacking in the suburbs,” Ms. Nichols said.

But she's not blind to the impact of homes that sit vacant or fall further and further into disrepair after a foreclosure.

“It's about community for me,” she said. “It does matter to me that I can walk down the street and feel comfortable because there are families living in the houses.”

Ms. Nichols was troubled to learn from a reporter that Sovereign Bank of Boston filed an initial petition to foreclose on a two-story house across the street from her last summer, according to property records.

“Losing that family would be a problem. They sit outside playing cards. They speak to everybody who comes by. They know everybody. The community needs people like that,” she said. “And abandoned homes do tend to attract problems.”

The owner of the house across the street didn't respond to a note left at the home and a listed telephone number for him was disconnected. Not all petitions result in foreclosures, and housing advocates note the pace of foreclosures has slowed noticeably this year as lenders work to alter their procedures to comply with a new state law that requires them to notify eligible borrowers of their rights to seek mortgage modifications.

What would come to be known as the foreclosure crisis had many contributing causes: from federal housing policies, to slack regulation of increasingly risky lending practices, to consumers who took on loans obviously beyond their ability to repay, to outright fraud on the part of some mortgage brokers and borrowers.

When home prices that had been rising for years peaked five years ago and then began to fall precipitously, borrowers suddenly found themselves owing more than their homes were worth. That meant they couldn't easily refinance or sell if they lost a job or started falling behind on payments for some other reason.

“There were subprime loans that were time bombs, loans that were bad the day they were made, sometimes fraudulently,” Mr. Ziegler said. “But there were plenty of people who had reasonable loan products that got laid off, or somebody in the family lost a job, and then they were stretched too far to make the payments.”

By late 2006, the number of seriously delinquent loans was rising across the country, driven at first by flimsy subprime loans to borrowers with poor credit, but eventually engulfing traditional fixed-rate mortgages as well.

Less than two years later, in mid-2008, mortgage loan delinquency and foreclosure rates had more than doubled their previous record highs from the previous year. The mortgage meltdown had reached crisis proportions.

While things have improved in many places over the last four years, the crisis grinds on in Union Hill.

A block farther north on Barclay Street from where Ms. Nichols lives, a towering three-decker shedding blue paint like a molting snake has been owned by Bank of New York Mellon since a foreclosure last spring, according to property records.

“There's a lot of them on the street. This one. That one,” said a woman, who pointed out several rundown buildings visible from her front steps.

The woman's name is Donna, but she didn't want to be identified by her last name for fear that making public her concerns about the neighborhood might draw unwanted attention from gang members.

Donna and her husband, Roy, who grew up in the area, moved last month to an apartment on Barclay Street next door to one of the bank-owned three-deckers on the street.

They were sold by their apartment's nice interior but now worry about the concentration of vacant and foreclosed buildings nearby, which they fear invites crime. They were startled awake recently by the sound of gunshots.

Then there are the lots overgrown with weeds, trash piling up in some places and even a large television set, an old model encased in a heavy wooden cabinet, dumped in the street nearby.

“If there were more homeowners here, people would care more,” she said. “It could change a lot if more people would care.”

Oak Hill Community Development Corp., a nonprofit developer based on Providence Street, has been working to accomplish exactly that, in part by buying problem properties and renovating them for lease or sale to families.

The agency's projects, often painted a pale shade of green with neat white trim, dot the streets of Union Hill, often standing out in their tidiness.

On Penn Avenue, for example, one of the single-family homes built by Oak Hill sits next door to a rundown bank-owned three-decker. Wells Fargo Bank foreclosed on the latter property early last year, according to property records.

The vinyl siding around the front door is charred and warped from a fire. A loose window pane on the second floor slapped against the wooden sill on a recent windy day. A Winchester real estate firm that bills itself as a foreclosure specialist has had the vacant, three-unit building listed for sale at $135,000 for months.

Ron Cino and his family live a few blocks away in Abercrombie House, the historic residence for Worcester Academy's heads of school since the 19th century. The house is set just off Providence Street on the stately campus of the elite prep school, which occupies a two-block-by-three-block rectangle in the center of Union Hill.

Mr. Cino grew up in Brooklyn, and he knows all too well the importance of families to any inner-city neighborhood.

“The elders sat outside in folding chairs and kept an eye on us, reported back to our parents,” he said. “We know that home ownership improves the quality of life in a community. We know it provides stability.”

While he's realistic about the challenges the neighborhood faces, Mr. Cino said he sees some signs that it may be inching toward an upswing, thanks in part to Oak Hill CDC's housing rehabilitation projects and aggressive code enforcement sweeps by city inspectors.

“It takes a long time. There aren't quick fixes for problems that are systemic like this,” he said.

Oak Hill Executive Director Mullen Sawyer, who grew up on Barclay Street, said his agency has had success averting foreclosures through its home ownership center that works on behalf of struggling borrowers.

Mr. Sawyer said there's simply not enough grant money to buy and rehab all the problem properties on Union Hill, so his strategy includes working with the city and residents on projects that improve the feel of the neighborhood to the point where people will feel comfortable buying and refurbishing homes.

“Union Hill Elementary had not one blade of grass in their entire campus. It had been that way for a generation. We put in a recycling program and greened their entire campus,” Mr. Sawyer said. “The kids designed a playground, and the parents and the community built it. It's theirs, so it doesn't get vandalized. That's our strategy.”

For her part, Ms. Laurie said she's not giving up on Union Hill after living on Dorchester Street for 63 years, since the day her parents brought her home from Memorial Hospital.

“Everybody in every neighborhood should be concerned,” she said. “If one part of the city is having problems, it affects everybody else.”